So, probably the biggest news for this week is I went to the doctor about my insomnia. I used a local service being run by a grad student to help with the translation on what I needed to do, which was really helpful. I’m really glad that was there to help, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own. Some of the questions on the surveys (because it was my first time going) were just bizarre. Anyway, medicine here is different – they don’t have any GPs like we do in NZ. The closest they have would be an internal medicine doctor, which is what I saw. Anyway, after a few preliminary questions, I got a prescription for sleeping pills, which I am now taking. So far they seem to work, despite taking more than twice as long as I was told to kick in. I was told at least six times by four different people not to mix it with alcohol, so if I forget and have a drink with dinner, I’ll have to do without the meds. I’m going to try my best to remember, though… I really want to get this fixed. Anyway, while I was there I also made an appointment to go see the psychologist next week, see if they can help me any.

Other interesting things from this week! The first is kind of hilarious, actually. I was walking on my way to get groceries and this little kid that’s playing in one of the side-streets I take stops and exclaims about my being a foreigner. I say yes, I’m a foreigner, smiling at the kid. He then asks me if I’m Korean! Trying not to bust a gut laughing I tell him I’m from New Zealand and continue on my merry way.

Ascaron, the company behind the Sacred games, went under this week. Not exactly great news for me since I was looking forward to getting Sacred 2 at some point and then the continuation when that rocked around. Chances of any continuation is looking pretty slim right now. For those of you that haven’t played Sacred, it’s an action-RPG very much like the Diablo games from Blizzard, but with a completely bent sense of humour. Despite the title, as far jokes go nothing is sacred, which very much appealed to me. If given the opportunity, it’s certainly a title I would enjoy working on. Although hopefully if it was a game I was involved with, it wouldn’t be plagued with the horrific amount of bugs that Sacred is somewhat notorious for.

While on the game front, I watch the latest Starcraft II Battle Report this week. It was really refreshing to watch the game as a spectator and it reminded me how much fun watching (and discussing) games can be even when you’re not directly playing. In a very real sense, games will become the next “sport” from a spectator point of view. For me it also raises some interesting questions about what would make for the most optimal user interfaces, and the kinds of interaction that “players” would have as spectators to eSports… there’s a whole lot of research to be done in there, but I don’t know if that’s something that I can do from a university environment. Not without creating my own (popular) game as a viable eSport title, or getting access to a company that has one already (I’m looking at you, Blizzard!).

While I’m talking about entertainment, did you know there’s a new Robin Hood movie coming up? That story just never stops being re-made, huh.

This week was more classes, which was both good and bad. I did not understand a word of my Human Interface class, so that’s going to be a bit of a challenge. The professor is also apparently “very Japanese” in that he doesn’t speak English, and his handwriting (in kanji) on the blackboard is hard to read even for the Japanese students, let alone people who can’t read kanji to begin with. So, that’ll be interesting.

Computer Vision was a bit easier to understand – the slides are in English. While the lecture was in Japanese, I could get at least half of the material by following along with what he was saying on the slides and the diagrams and so on, which is pretty neat. Enough to know that I’ll enjoy learning more in that class – the lecturer is really cool as well, seems to have a great sense of humour and interacts with the class really well. If I decide to take up vision for some reason, I’ll know which professor I want to work with!

My last class taught in Japanese is Socio-Information and Communication. I’m not sure if that’s actually what the title is, only what the translation is from the Japanese… anyway, I understood maybe a third of the material. Slides in Japanese (apart from the numbers, luckily), lecture in Japanese, discussion in Japanese… I’m going to have a tough time. The irritating thing was, I understood enough to know that the material that was being covered would be really interesting to me if I understood more of it. They were talking about the independent media creation industry in Japan (music, comics, games, etc), trends in media consumption (television vs online) and a bunch of other things I didn’t understand but would have liked to. I’m going to have to try and get my hands on the slides and translate them myself so I can keep following along. All good stuff!

This week I added some more bits and pieces to my banking system, which felt fairly rewarding. Doesn’t help my research in the slightest, but lets me do some (relatively) mindless coding and feel productive. I did talk to Honda-san about another research idea I had to do with animation, I’ll be talking to Todo-san about that next week I think. I still want to continue and finish my current research idea, but having a back-burner idea is apparently quite a good plan (according to my supervisor).

On the fun front, I played some basketball, watched more anime, read some manga (not in Japanese yet, I’m afraid), chatted to various friends online (including Anastasia and her friend Caitlyn while they were having fun on the Wii over in Florida), saw Watchmen with Kyoko (really enjoyed that)… oh, and lastly (but not leastly) while I was making a few smaller updates to my own site, I added a writing section, as per request. I only have one piece in there for now, but I’ll add more next week and you can let me know what you think. Be aware of the disclaimer on that page.